The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers,
and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not
be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause,
supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place
to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

As far as I know, this is the exact three month renewal of what has
been the case for the past seven years. This renewal is carried out
by the FISA Court under the business records section of the Patriot
Act. Therefore, it is lawful.

It has been briefed to Congress and the letters that we have
distributed — and you’ll note on the dates, this is prior to
the Patriot Act amendments coming before the body, each of those. As
you know, this is just Continue reading →

Decades before 9/11, and the subsequent Bush order that directed the
NSA to eavesdrop on every phone call, e-mail message, and
who-knows-what-else going into or out of the United States, U.S.
citizens included, they did the same thing with telegrams. It was
called Project Shamrock, and anyone who thinks this is new legal and
technological terrain should read up on that program.

Project SHAMROCK…was an espionage exercise that involved the
accumulation of all telegraphic data entering into or exiting from
the United States. The Armed Forces Security Agency (AFSA) and its
successor NSA were given direct access to daily microfilm copies of
all incoming, outgoing, and transiting telegraphs via the Western
Union and its associates RCA and ITT. Operation Shamrock lasted well
into the 1960s when computerized operations (HARVEST) made it
possible to search for keywords rather than read through all
communications.

“Twenty years ago, if you went into an airport
you would walk up to a
counter and present paper tickets to a human being. That person would
register you on a computer, notify the flight you’d arrived, and check
your luggage in. All this was done by humans.”

Well, except for that part about “a computer”. And the flight computers
in the airplane. And the FAA computers. And….

This is also true:

“Today, you walk into an airport and look for a machine.
You put in a
frequent-flier card or credit card, and it takes just three or four
seconds to get back a boarding pass, receipt, and luggage tag. What
interests me is what happens in those three or four seconds. The moment
the card goes in, you are starting a huge conversation conducted entirely
among machines. Once your name is recognized, computers are checking your
flight status with the airlines, your past travel history, your name with
the TSA (and possibly also with the National Security Agency). They are
checking your seat choice, your frequent-flier status, and your access
to lounges.”

While Bruce Sterling can (rightly, I think) say that’s not AI,
nonetheless it all happens without
much human intervention. And pixelated images of airplanes don’t
start to indicate what’s going on in there.

The punchline:

“Here’s the challenge: In the past, every
million-dollar increase in economic output generated on the order of ten
jobs. In the future, in the productive Second Economy, it may generate
only one or two.”

Today, a group of 83 prominent Internet inventors and engineers sent
an open letter to members of the United States Congress, stating their
opposition to the SOPA and PIPA Internet blacklist bills that are under
consideration in the House and Senate respectively.

The signatories are people such as Vint Cerf
you may have heard of even if you know nothing about the technical details
of Internet, and many other people who helped produce the network you
are using now.
I know many of them, and they are right.
If you want a free and open Internet, call or write
your Senators and Congress members today,
and tell them to vote against PIPA and SOPA.

The full text of the letter is appended below.

-jsq

We, the undersigned, have played various parts in building a network
called the Internet. We wrote and debugged the software; we defined the
standards and protocols that talk over that network. Many of us invented
parts of it. We’re just a little proud of the social and economic benefits
that our project, the Internet, has brought with it.

Last year, many of us wrote to you and your colleagues to warn about
the proposed “COICA” copyright and censorship legislation. Today, we
are writing again to reiterate our concerns about the SOPA and PIPA
derivatives of last year’s bill, that are under consideration in the
House and Senate. In many respects, these proposals are worse than the
one we were alarmed to read last year.

If enacted, either of these bills will create an environment of tremendous
fear and uncertainty for technological innovation, and seriously harm
the credibility of the United States in its role as a steward of key
Internet infrastructure. Regardless of recent amendments to SOPA, both
bills will risk fragmenting the Internet’s global domain name system (DNS)
and have other capricious technical consequences. In exchange for this,
such legislation would engender censorship that will simultaneously be
circumvented by deliberate infringers while hampering innocent parties’
right and ability to communicate and express themselves online.

All censorship schemes impact speech beyond the category they were
intended to restrict, but these bills are particularly egregious in that
regard because they cause entire domains to vanish from the Web, not
just infringing pages or files. Worse, an incredible range of useful,
law-abiding sites can be blacklisted under these proposals. In fact,
it seems that this has already begun to happen under the nascent DHS/ICE
seizures program.

Censorship of Internet infrastructure will inevitably cause network
errors and security problems. This is true in China, Iran and other
countries that censor the network today; it will be just as true of
American censorship. It is also true regardless of whether censorship is
implemented via the DNS, proxies, firewalls, or any other method. Types
of network errors and insecurity that we wrestle with today will become
more widespread, and will affect sites other than those blacklisted by
the American government.

The current bills — SOPA explicitly and PIPA implicitly — also
threaten engineers who build Internet systems or offer services that
are not readily and automatically compliant with censorship actions by
the U.S. government. When we designed the Internet the first time, our
priorities were reliability, robustness and minimizing central points
of failure or control. We are alarmed that Congress is so close to
mandating censorship-compliance as a design requirement for new Internet
innovations. This can only damage the security of the network, and give
authoritarian governments more power over what their citizens can read
and publish.

The US government has regularly claimed that it supports a free and open
Internet, both domestically and abroad. We cannot have a free and open
Internet unless its naming and routing systems sit above the political
concerns and objectives of any one government or industry. To date, the
leading role the US has played in this infrastructure has been fairly
uncontroversial because America is seen as a trustworthy arbiter and a
neutral bastion of free expression. If the US begins to use its central
position in the network for censorship that advances its political and
economic agenda, the consequences will be far-reaching and destructive.

Senators, Congressmen, we believe the Internet is too important and
too valuable to be endangered in this way, and implore you to put these
bills aside.

Signed,

Vint Cerf, co-designer of TCP/IP, one of the “fathers of the Internet”, signing as private citizen

Paul Vixie, author of BIND, the most widely-used DNS server software, and President of the Internet Systems Consortium

Tony Li, co-author of BGP (the protocol used to arrange Internet routing); chair of the IRTF’s Routing Research Group; a Cisco Fellow; and architect for many of the systems that have actually been used to build the Internet

Steven Bellovin, invented the DNS cache contamination attack; co-authored the first book on Internet security; recipient of the 2007 NIST/NSA National Computer Systems Security Award and member of the DHS Science and Technology Advisory Committee

Jim Gettys, editor of the HTTP/1.1 protocol standards, which we use to do everything on the Web

Steve Deering, Ph.D., invented the IP multicast feature of the Internet; lead designer of IPv6 (version 6 of the Internet Protocol)

David Ulevitch, David Ulevitch, CEO of OpenDNS, which offers alternative DNS services for enhanced security.

Elizabeth Feinler, director of the Network Information Center (NIC) at SRI International, administered the Internet Name Space from 1970 until 1989 and developed the naming conventions for the internet top level domains (TLDs) of .mil, .gov, .com, .org, etc. under contracts to DoD

Robert W. Taylor, founded and funded the beginning of the ARPAnet; founded and managed the Xerox PARC Computer Science Lab which designed and built the first networked personal computer (Alto), the Ethernet, the first internet protocol and internet, and desktop publishing

Fred Baker, former IETF chair, has written about 50 RFCs and contributed to about 150 more, regarding widely used Internet technology

Dan Kaminsky, Chief Scientist, DKH

Esther Dyson, EDventure; founding chairman, ICANN; former chairman, EFF; active investor in many start-ups that support commerce, news and advertising on the Internet; director, Sunlight Foundation

Walt Daniels, IBM’s contributor to MIME, the mechanism used to add attachments to emails

Nathaniel Borenstein, Chief Scientist, Mimecast; one of the two authors of the MIME protocol, and has worked on many other software systems and protocols, mostly related to e-mail and payments

Simon Higgs, designed the role of the stealth DNS server that protects a.root-servers.net; worked on all versions of Draft Postel for creating new TLDs and addressed trademark issues with a complimentary Internet Draft; ran the shared-TLD mailing list back in 1995 which defined the domain name registry/registrar relationship; was a root server operator for the Open Root Server Consortium; founded coupons.com in 1994

John Bartas, was the technical lead on the first commercial IP/TCP software for IBM PCs in 1985-1987 at The Wollongong Group. As part of that work, developed the first tunneling RFC, rfc-1088

Nathan Eisenberg, Atlas Networks Senior System Administrator; manager of 25K sq. ft. of data centers which provide services to Starbucks, Oracle, and local state

Dave Crocker, author of Internet standards including email, DKIM anti-abuse, electronic data interchange and facsimile, developer of CSNet and MCI national email services, former IETF Area Director for network management, DNS and standards, recipient of IEEE Internet Award for contributions to email, and serial entrepreneur

Craig Partridge, architect of how email is routed through the Internet; designed the world’s fastest router in the mid 1990s

Alia Atlas, designed software in a core router (Avici) and has various RFCs around resiliency, MPLS, and ICMP

Kelly Kane, shared web hosting network operator

Robert Rodgers, distinguished engineer, Juniper Networks

Anthony Lauck, helped design and standardize routing protocols and local area network protocols and served on the Internet Architecture Board

Ramaswamy Aditya, built various networks and web/mail content and application hosting providers including AS10368 (DNAI) which is now part of AS6079 (RCN); did network engineering and peering for that provider; did network engineering for AS25 (UC Berkeley); currently does network engineering for AS177-179 and others (UMich)

Blake Pfankuch, Connecting Point of Greeley, Network Engineer

Jon Loeliger, has implemented OSPF, one of the main routing protocols used to determine IP packet delivery; at other companies, has helped design and build the actual computers used to implement core routers or storage delivery systems; at another company, installed network services (T-1 lines and ISP service) into Hotels and Airports across the country

Jon Callas, worked on a number of Internet security standards including OpenPGP, ZRTP, DKIM, Signed Syslog, SPKI, and others; also participated in other standards for applications and network routing

John Kemp, Principal Software Architect, Nokia; helped build the distributed authorization protocol OAuth and its predecessors; former member of the W3C Technical Architecture Group

Christian Huitema, worked on building the Internet in France and Europe in the 80’s, and authored many Internet standards related to IPv6, RTP, and SIP; a former member of the Internet Architecture Board

Steve Goldstein, Program Officer for International Networking Coordination at the National Science Foundation 1989-2003, initiated several projects that spread Internet and advanced Internet capabilities globally

David Newman, 20 years’ experience in performance testing of Internet
infrastructure; author of three RFCs on measurement techniques (two on firewall performance, one on test traffic contents)

Justin Krejci, helped build and run the two biggest and most successful municipal wifi networks located in Minneapolis, MN and Riverside, CA; building and running a new FTTH network in Minneapolis

Christopher Liljenstolpe, was the chief architect for AS3561 (at the time about 30% of the Internet backbone by traffic), and AS1221 (Australia’s main Internet infrastructure)

Joe Hamelin, co-founder of Seattle Internet Exchange (http://www.seattleix.net) in 1997, and former peering engineer for Amazon in 2001

John Adams, operations engineer at Twitter, signing as a private citizen

Samuel Moats, senior systems engineer for the Department of Defense; helps build and defend the networks that deliver data to Defense Department users

John Vittal, created the first full email client and the email standards still in use today

Ryan Rawdon, built out and maintains the network infrastructure for a rapidly growing company in our country’s bustling advertising industry; was on the technical operations team for one of our country’s largest residential ISPs

Brian Haberman, has been involved in the design of IPv6, IGMP/MLD, and NTP within the IETF for nearly 15 years

Eric Tykwinski, Network Engineer working for a small ISP based in the Philadelphia region; currently maintains the network as well as the DNS and server infrastructure

Noel Chiappa, has been working on the lowest level stuff (the IP protocol level) since 1977; name on the ‘Birth of the Internet’ plaque at Stanford); actively helping to develop new ‘plumbing’ at that level

Robert M. Hinden, worked on the gateways in the early Internet, author of many of the core IPv6 specifications, active in the IETF since the first IETF meeting, author of 37 RFCs, and current Internet Society Board of Trustee member

Alexander McKenzie, former member of the Network Working Group and participated in the design of the first ARPAnet Host protocols; was the manager of the ARPAnet Network Operation Center that kept the network running in the early 1970s; was a charter member of the International Network Working Group that developed the ideas used in TCP and IP

Keith Moore, was on the Internet Engineering Steering Group from 1996-2000, as one of two Area Directors for applications; wrote or co-wrote technical specification RFCs associated with email, WWW, and IPv6 transition

Guy Almes, led the connection of universities in Texas to the NSFnet during the late 1980s; served as Chief Engineer of Internet2 in the late 1990s

David Mercer, formerly of The River Internet, provided service to more of Arizona than any local or national ISP

Paul Timmins, designed and runs the multi-state network of a medium sized telephone and internet company in the Midwest

Stephen L. Casner, led the working group that designed the Real-time Transport Protocol that carries the voice signals in VoIP systems

Tim Rutherford, DNS and network administrator at C4

Mike Alexander, helped implement (on the Michigan Terminal System at the University of Michigan) one of the first EMail systems to be connected to the Internet (and to its predecessors such as Bitnet, Mailnet, and UUCP); helped with the basic work to connect MTS to the Internet; implemented various IP related drivers on early Macintosh systems: one allowed TCP/IP connections over ISDN lines and another made a TCP connection look like a serial port

John Klensin, Ph.D., early and ongoing role in the design of Internet applications and coordination and administrative policies

L. Jean Camp, former Senior Member of the Technical Staff at Sandia National Laboratories, focusing on computer security; eight years at Harvard’s Kennedy School; tenured Professor at Indiana Unviersity’s School of Informatics with research addressing security in society.

Louis Pouzin, designed and implemented the first computer network using datagrams (CYCLADES), from which TCP/IP was derived

Carl Page, helped found eGroups, the biggest social network
of its day, 14 million users at the point of sale to Yahoo for around $430,000,000, at which point it became Yahoo Groups

Jack Haverty (MSEE, BSEE MIT 1970), Principal Investigator for several DARPA projects including the first Internet development and operation; Corporate Network Architect for BBN; Founding member of the IAB/ICCB; Internet Architect and Corporate Founding Member of W3C for Oracle Corporation

Glenn Ricart, Managed the original (FIX) Internet interconnection point

Imagine that when we started Apple we set things up so that we could
charge purchasers of our computers by the number of bits they use. The
personal computer revolution would have been delayed a decade or more. If
I had to pay for each bit I used on my 6502 microprocessor, I would not
have been able to build my own computers anyway.

He also details examples of how difficult it was to start a new service
the way the telephone system used to be,
how radio used to all be freely receivable,
and how cable TV is mis-regulated.
He summarizes his case:

I frequently speak to different types of audiences all over the
country. When I’m asked my feeling on Net Neutrality I tell the open
truth. When I was first asked to “sign on” with some good people
interested in Net Neutrality my initial thought was that the economic
system works better with tiered pricing for various customers. On the
other hand, I’m a founder of the EFF and I care a lot about individuals
and their own importance. Finally, the thought hit me that every time
and in every way that the telecommunications careers have had power or
control, we the people wind up getting screwed. Every audience that I
speak this statement and phrase to bursts into applause.

Then he asks for all that not to happen to the Internet:

We have very few government agencies that the populace views as looking
out for them, the people. The FCC is one of these agencies that is still
wearing a white hat. Not only is current action on Net Neutrality one
of the most important times ever for the FCC, it’s probably the most
momentous and watched action of any government agency in memorable times
in terms of setting our perception of whether the government represents
the wealthy powers or the average citizen, of whether the government is
good or is bad. This decision is important far beyond the domain of the
FCC itself.

73 Democratic members of Congress signed
a letter
drafted by telco and cableco lobbyists against net neutrality.
Save the Internet has sufficiently fisked it.
My favorite point is that when AT&T was required as a condition
of acquiring Bellsouth in 2006 to abide by net neutrality,
it increased its infrastructure investments.
As soon as that two year requirement was up,
so were the investments.
(And they didn’t even honor all the requirements,
such as
a low-end $10/month service.)

We can let the telcos and cablecos continue to turn the Internet into cable TV,
as they have said they want to do.
Under the conditions they want, we never would have had the
world wide web, google, YouTube, flickr, facebook, etc.

And left to their plan, the duopoly will continue
cherry-picking densely-populated areas and
leaving rural areas,
such as south Georgia, where I live, to sink or swim.
Most of the white area in the Georgia map never had anybody even
try a speed test.
Most of the rest of south Georgia had really slow access.
Which maybe wouldn’t be a problem if we had competitive newspapers
(we don’t) or competing TV stations (we don’t).
Or if we didn’t need to publish public information like health care
details online, as Sanford Bishop (D GA-02) says he plans to do.
How many people in his district can even get to it?
How many won’t because their link is too slow?
How many could but won’t because it costs too much?

John Barrow (D GA-12) has
a fancy flashy home page that most people in his district probably can’t get to.
Yet he signed the letter against net neutrality.